Music /
Tom Jones

Edit Locked

"Music is great. It all depends on what mood you're in... what you want to listen to. If it's party time, you listen to, you know, party music. If you want to dance with somebody. But then again, if it's a slow dance, you need something slow. It all depends on the mood."

— Sir Tom Jones, OBE

Advertisement:

The man... the myth... the legend. Tom Jones is one of the biggest, most influential singers and musicians ever to come out of the British music scene. You've felt his influence, even if you never realized just how huge he really was.

Since the 1960s, Sir Thomas John Woodward, OBE (born 7 June 1940 in Pontypridd, South Wales), better known by his stage name "Tom Jones" ...or these days, "Sir Tom Jones"... is a Welsh singer. He became one of the most popular vocalists to emerge from the British Invasion. He is a true musical polymath, having recorded songs in nearly every genre of popular music (pop, rock, R&B, punk, show tunes, country, club music, techno, soul, gospel, blues, and rap). Jones has sold over 100 million records, and has almost forty Top 40 hits to his name, including "It's Not Unusual", "What's New Pussycat", "Delilah", "The Green Grass of Home", "Kiss" (a cover of the Prince classic that actually outsold the original), "Burning Love" (a cover of the Elvis Presley classic), "Sex Bomb", and the song that has become his signature, "She's a Lady".

Advertisement:

Jones has a powerful, bluesy baritone voice that is reminiscent of Elvis Presley (one of Jones' personal friends, as it turns out). His voice is versatile enough, however, to handle pretty much any type of music he decides to apply it to. He's a legendary Pornomancer whose singing would regularly cause women to throw articles of clothing at him while he was onstage.

Tom Jones has contributed to the soundtracks of over 130 different productions (including television, films, plays, cartoons, and even video games), and has been known to occasionally act (usually either as himself or in bit parts). Between 1980 and 1982, he had his own variety series on the BBC called The Tom Jones Show. These days, when he's not out there rocking the stage at age 77 (he still plays about a hundred shows a year), he's a coach on the British version of The Voice (during the first season of which he took contestant Leanne Mitchell to the championship). The other coaches apparently consider him to be "the man to beat" on the show because of his vast experience and know-how.

Advertisement:

Over the course of his career, he's received four Grammies, an MTV Video Music Award, two Brit Awards, and was knighted (the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music".

Despite his own admitted "horde of infidelities" (including one that resulted in an illegitimate son, whom he barely acknowledges), Jones stayed married to the same woman, Melinda, from 1957 until her death in 2016. The couple has one son, Mark, and carefully do not mention Tom's other son. These days Tom splits his time between Los Angeles and London.

Tom Jones's songs and his music provide examples of the following tropes:

Compelling Voice: The man can still cause women to throw undergarments at him just by singing.

Cover Version: Two of his biggest hits, "Kiss" and "Burning Love" were covers of the Prince and Elvis Presley songs, respectively. Jones' version of "Kiss" actually outsold Prince's original worldwide.

The album Reload is, with the exception "Sex Bomb", entirely cover versions sung as duets with other artists/groups, such as the cover of Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House" with The Cardigans.

Lyrical Dissonance: "It's Not Unusual" has a tune that swings in Jones' usual manner, but tells the story of a man with an unrequited love who suffers jealousy when he sees the woman he desires with other men. The big clue that the lyrics aren't happy as the tune is when he says, "I wanna die."

"Delilah" is a bright, upbeat sounding song with a very catchy chorus. Then you suddenly realize that you're singing about a man who stabbed his cheating girlfriend and is asking for forgiveness. The police are battering down the door as he begs her dead body for forgiveness. The song is, in fact, very dark. But people still sing it at holiday camps because the tune's nice.

Mr. Fanservice: Leather pants, unbuttoned shirts, just that huge baritone by itself! No wonder panty-throwing became a tradition at Tom Jones concerts. Hell, you should see him dance.

Pornomancer: As noted, even now when he's in his 70s, he can sing women out of their clothing whenever he damned well wants to.

Proper Lady: The song "She's a Lady" seems to be about this female archetypal character. She's got style, she's got grace, she knows her place, she's never in the way, she has always something nice to say... That little lady has got all it takes to make her man happy.

Renaissance Man: Seriously, its easier to count the number of musical genres this man hasn't recorded in than to count the ones he has.

Silly Love Songs: A lot of his songs are this. Of course, with that voice, you can hardly tell. "What's New Pussycat" might be the most obvious example.

Singing Voice Dissonance: He speaks with a thick, very recognizable Welsh accent. When he sings, it sounds like he's right out of Memphis Tennessee.

Source Music: In The Emperor's New Groove, Jones voices a singer who croons to Emperor Kuzco while Kuzco dances along. The animated singer looks remarkably like the real Jones, in fact. Funnily enough, he took the role after Sting (who was already writing songs for the movie) turned it down, saying he was too old to make it work.

Similarly, at the end of Mars Attacks! (in which Jones appears as himself), Jones delivers a performance of his hit "It's Not Unusual" to a crowd of woodland animals, all of whom rock along to the tune.

World of Chaos: His "It'll Be Me" music video with Jools Holland. The original Jerry Lee Lewis song deliberately names all kinds of random bizarre things that you might see, and almost all of them appear in the video, usually rising up out of Jools' piano.

Your Cheating Heart: "Delilah" is from the perspective of the man being cheated on as he takes his murderous revenge.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy